


basil and cleopatra

by jontinf



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Animal Death, Dark Humor, Domesticity, Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent, F/M, Not A Fix-It, Post-Traumatic Stress, Sexual Content, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-05-29 00:13:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6351166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jontinf/pseuds/jontinf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara and the Doctor if they'd never stopped running.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

“Where can he run?”

“Where he always runs. Away. Just away.”

 

 

 

 

 

They make it up as they go, a plan to win the day. Find the TARDIS. Evade the Time Lords. Run away forever. Not necessarily in that order.

Flying high on adrenaline, they burst through the doors of the new TARDIS into her bedroom. It’s taken on the form of an armoire. Old clothes dust her floor in gold. Earlier versions of themselves must have left for Rigsy’s moments ago. Somewhere out there, she has eight hours to live.

Clara goes straight for the closet, then pulls out a suitcase, thumps it onto the foot of her bed, and begins packing hastily.

“I’ve never been an outlaw,” she says. Her childhood dream. Now that they’ve made their choice, there is no time to panic or second guess. It isn’t hard. She’s the kind of person who revels in most terrifying things.

The Doctor tries to help. He dashes around the perimeter of her bed, walks into the hall, and return moments later with two left shoes, a receipt, a sugar bowl, and an entire packet of jammy dodgers. To his credit, she only rejects eighty percent of his suggestions. The last time he ran away, he only needed to bring a granddaughter.

But this is not packing in a widely understood sense. She will bring what the TARDIS can’t replicate. Old photographs, books with inscriptions, belongings she’s rescued: her mother’s frayed jean jacket, an identity disc from the British army, the high marks of her first student. Ties to a brief existence on Earth. Things that will keep her sane.

They roam her bedroom in their jailbreak frenzy, bumping shoulders, exchanging nervous grins. He quietly keeps an eye out for symptoms of prophecies unfurling, damage inflicted. Side glances through her window for reapers and zeppelins and robot dogs. Searching plaster for cracks that weren’t there before.

He stops at her bedside table. The hands of the clock won’t move. A nursery rhyme breaks into his mind. That day in April when all the clocks stopped ticking.

“Clara.” He stays deathly still. “Your clock isn’t working.”

She gives it a cursory look. “Hasn’t for years. Family heirloom.”

“Good,” he says softly.

That catches her attention. “‘Good?’”

He begins poking around in her closet, finds something he recognizes, and grabs the hanger to reclaim it. “Why do you have my shirt?”

“You left it behind after you let out the capuchins.”

He’d once mistaken the monkeys in the London Zoo for benign monkey-like aliens. They were known for possessing an affinity for Hootie and the Blowfish. Oxford Street looked like  _Jumanji_ for the better half of a week. Kate Stewart had seriously considered shooting him in the face.

Clara smiles. “It’s a wonder neither of us have been arrested.” She slams her suitcase shut and looks up at the Doctor only to immediately turn back to face her vanity. “And you’re taking off your shirt.”

She pushes an errant of hair behind her ear, in need of something to do with her hands. He’d mentioned changing his shirt earlier. There was no indication that he planned on doing so in her bedroom while she was still in it.

“Right. Well.” She cracks perhaps the third most embarrassed grin in history. “We’re at that stage in our relationship.”

Clara lets her head hang a little before resolving to very earnestly stare at each of her three reflections; but then she catches sight of a nipple poking behind his undershirt. 

“What are you nattering on about?” he says.

Even in a state of undress, he manages to be a complete tit. Pun not intended.

She turns to find him struggling. His hands are trembling, failing at coaxing a button into its rightful place.

He flinches when she gently touches his knuckles. There is an electric chill to her skin.

“Here,” she says.

He stares at her hard, as if she were out of line, but then relents.

She doesn’t meet his eye as she finishes doing his buttons. Slowly, precisely, she slips her hand into his trousers to tuck in his shirt and feels his stomach contract against the back of her fingers.

Her hair has fallen into her eyes, and he budges fleetingly, preparing to brush it out of the way. When he decides against it, his palms press against the sides of his trousers.

“I’m perfectly capable of dressing myself.”

“Says the man who once flounced around the universe in jim jams.”

His mouth twitches, and he’s able to will himself to hold her stray hairs between his fingers. “You noticed?”

She barely smiles and helps him into his jacket. It’s too big, makes him look like a grave digger.

“The velvety coat,” she says. “You left it behind, didn’t you?”

He fixes his gaze on her shoes. “Probably in the barn.”

“Your barn?” She once met a lonely boy there, soothed him to sleep.

He looks up, trying his best to take charge. “We’re not going back to get the coat.”

That lonely boy returned a millennia older with a joy and renewed hope in starting anew, of a homecoming. Her chest aches. He’ll never have that now.

“Gallifrey is your home.” The words sound like condolences. _Go be a king_ , she once told him, smiling through a broken heart.

He steadies his fingers around hers, knows her thoughts, and tilts his head toward her suitcase of totems. “Home doesn’t have to be a place.”

 

 

 

 

 

They don’t sleep in this TARDIS. It’s not theirs after all.

“Does it make you feel unfaithful?” She’s only half-joking. They walk along the balcony of a roadside motel outside Albuquerque. The year is 1932.

He stops reading the numbers on the doors out loud, fingering their brass engravings as if reading Braille. “I don’t want to make it a habit.”

She spots the room first and tries the key. They’ll be sharing. Safer to stay together is how they justify it. She already anticipates the bed or sofa argument, the drowsy politeness, who can out-martyr the other, or maybe not. He might collapse on the sofa, stake his claim to discomfort, snoring before she can argue otherwise. She’s not in the mood for either, wants nothing more than chalk dust on her skirt and his armchair, the smell of its worn leather and the rare books that surround it. She’s often woken up in that chair draped in a blanket, someone having dog-eared the last page in her book. Was it another thing he did when she wasn’t looking? Or was it his better half? She likes to think the TARDIS came to like her despite herself, charmed at long last.

The room is sparse, wrapped in deep yellow and burgundy wallpaper with matching curtains. The site of a future haunting. There are two twin beds. Somehow this suggests as much intimacy as sharing one. On instinct, she takes the bed closest to the window.

“Do you think they have her?” she asks, examining her surroundings. They both know the Time Lords are callous enough to use the TARDIS as leverage.

“They wouldn’t stand a chance.” The Doctor peeks under a lampshade, opens each drawer, flips through a phonebook—how they’ve been choosing their aliases. Tonight they’re the Castigliones. He can pass for Italian, she’d told him.

“Old girl’s tough, you know?” There’s pride in his smile, just a trace. She knows what he’ll dream of tonight.

 

 

 

 

 

Clara later lies on top of the covers and spies their current TARDIS outside the window, enduring in the cold like a rejected newborn. It has taken on the form of a vintage Ford reminiscent of so many getaway cars in history. There’s a trap door in the boot that leads to the console room.

The Doctor wears unlaced shoes in bed and stares at the slow rotation of the ceiling fan.

Clara woke up this morning in another century. She had a Netflix queue, unanswered phone calls, overdue library books. She was saving for old age. Now they’re fugitives hiding out in the American West.

“Doctor.”

His voice is a hushed crackle. “Yeah?”

She doesn’t have anything to say. Just wants to break the silence. There’s that lightness in her ears again, the want of a heartbeat.

No time to mince words. She’ll say the first thing that comes to mind.

“Sing to me.”

“Have you gone mad?”

“No.”

_“No.”_

They manage quiet for an entire five seconds.

“Sing to me.”

His eyebrows go properly concave, and her lips suppress a smile. Was annoying him always this fun?

“Have you got a concussion?”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Stop thinking then.”

“You don’t think I’ve tried?”

The Doctor sighs. He’s having trouble as well. The two of them are incorrigible. “Of all the things—”

“Something sad.”

He sighs again, long-suffering and heavy, and turns his face. “Do you like Tom Waits?”

“Sure.”

He points at her: abandon all hope, ye who enter. “Not after this.”

They return to contemplating the ceiling. No cracks up there. Not just yet. He clears his throat, mutters under his breath, and prepares to do her bidding.

She smiles. “I doubt that.”

 

 

 

 

 

They’re in a Benedictine abbey in 14th century Italy. The old monk recognizes Clara. She’s never met him in her life. He might have met one of her echoes, but she hopes he’s from her own future. It would help confidently entertaining the thought of one.

The Doctor thinks the monk can help him find his TARDIS, maybe solve some of his other problems. “He’s only part human,” he explained. “But don’t mention that to his face.”

“The answer is simpler than you’re allowing it to be.” The monk speaks in Italian, blithely putting a morsel of cheeseburger into his mouth. Smuggling it into the abbey was something of a tradition. He grins at them when they leave, his front teeth missing like a raggedy old toddler, the opposite of the Doctor’s great exasperation.

She stands with him in the cloisters and can imagine the future gift shop, the donation boxes, and air of sterility. The huddled masses in this time are desperately poor, seeking sanctuary in the mountains after being displaced by a war between noble families. She and the Doctor blend in without difficulty.

“Sorry,” Clara tells him.

He shrugs, a self-deprecating grimace. “How’s that pulse?”

She places two fingers on her wrist. “Nothing.”

He doesn’t look at her, won’t let slip even a hint of despair. “No, it’s fine. It’ll be fine.”

She holds his hand and chooses to believe him. They’ve come too far. “Yeah.”

“Your hands are cold,” he says.

“I think it’s a side effect.”

He bring her hands to his mouth and breathes warmth onto them. “How’s that?”

He is riveting, the earnestness in this simplest, most human of gestures. She remains in his grasp and stands close enough to smell the scent of his skin, study the long fine bones of his fingers.

She leans into him, like whispering a secret, and kisses his lips softly. They sink into each other as a tidal wave of air leaves their lungs. Their chests deflate, and the muscles of their shoulders come loose.

 _Words. We should leave it at words,_ one of them ought to say, always imagined saying. The relief of it feels mythical. Atlas no longer obliged to carry the heavens. Somewhere above, a gargoyle is blushing.

“Oh, Christ.” She breathes a laugh. The inappropriateness is not lost on her. They’ve caught the attention of the parishioners. Hesitant glances drift their way.

“What is it?” he asks.

“I was hoping you’d be bad at this.”

“Bad?”

“Such a disappointment.” She grins easily. “I quite enjoyed that.”

He makes a face. “I was hoping you’d be better.”

“Me?”

“I think my gran could do better.”

“Do you often think about your own gran when you’re kissing people?”

“Would you rather I think about your gran?”

Her face falls, and she sees the panic surge within him.

“Clara,” he says, “I would never actually think about your gran—”

“It’s just that my gran thinks I’m dead.”

A dull and sad realization spoken out loud. Nothing that she expects to be corrected.

His embarrassment recalibrates into a mounting guilt, even if this specific thing is actually not his fault. In fact, it is well within his purview to correct. He pulls her in the direction of the TARDIS, which has remained a Depression era Ford. Some chickens have found their way into the backseat. A spacetime customs violation in waiting.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“We’re paying your gran a visit. Your dad too. We should let Rigsy know. We can leave a message with the baby if he’s not home.” He stops when he sees her reaction. She’s not as enthused as he thought she’d be. “Right, right. Rigsy doesn’t speak baby, does he? He really should learn now that he’s living with one.”

“Time travellers should never visit their own graves.” There are only so many times they can get away with not destroying the universe.

“There’s no grave, Clara.” His face hovers close to hers, the requisite proximity to shut out the world, as close as when they first laid eyes on each other. “Not if I can help it.”

 

 

 

 

 

Somebody spills a can of New Coke on the telepathic interface, and they’re hurled into Blackpool of the 1980s. The sky and sea are shrouded in soft striated hues of orange, pink, and blue, making the Pleasure Beach resemble a nursery, an early morning reprieve from dreary Thatcherite Britain.

Near the pier, in the backseat of an old American car, she wraps her legs tightly around his waist after having pulled him down by the lapels, mouth and tongue greeting his own. They’re rule breaking. Not just The One. He never sits with his back to a door, along with stopping his breath when meeting strangers, a pregnant pause to listen for an extra heart.

Her hand slips between their bodies to undo his trousers. He hisses slightly at her coldness. This is something he’d been consciously aiming not to do, and he feels an immediate frustration with himself for not succeeding.

“Sorry," she says and moves her hand away.

He grabs it with determination and kisses every bit of skin, its lines and turns, the chemical energy it contains. Again and again and again.

A golden glow forms in his hands, and she groans. His mouth sinks into her neck, pressing upon her more shadowy kisses. He squeezes his eyes shut. They’d just met with her family and Rigsy. The sight of Clara holding Rigsy’s daughter stayed with him. It was a moment when she must have grasped that she’ll likely never have one of her own.

A little more. Like Skaro, just like Skaro. A little more will start her heart.

 _I could die like this,_ he thinks. _If I died, it’d be alright. She’d be alright._

“Don’t you dare.” She pushes him away, livid and bereft.

His skull clumsily knocks against the roof. Such a sight might have made her smile in another life. In this one, she could kill him. He’d forged a telepathic link by mistake. She’d heard everything.

Trembling and disoriented, he rubs the back of his head. The colour of his skin has gone a hollow grey. She pulls back when he reaches for her. He supposes that she feels betrayed.

It doesn’t stop him from feeling hurt. This could save her. He could do this. Why is only she allowed to be so reckless? He has lived so long, and she not enough.

“Doctor.” Each syllable she speaks is gritted between her teeth. The last time she spoke to him this way, it was the end of them. “You are _not_ the only person who ever lost someone.”

Those words once kept him fighting. Now the recognition boils into anger. She is no figment but flesh, impermanent, and truly heartless for so easily dismissing the weight of her own death.

“Nobody’s ever lost you,” he says. “Not like I have.”

He staggers out of the car before she can put him in his place, show him the error of his ways. He feels incapable of finding it within himself to care. The door slams behind him.

 

 

 

 

  

Clara breathes hard. Her hand sprawled in her hair and her dress hitched to her waist.

Fuck him then.

She crawls into the driver’s seat. The keys have been left in the ignition. The radio broadcasts a station from the 1940s. Churchill had declared the end of World War II earlier. This is something they do now, poke their heads in junctures of armistice, discovery, and revolution; confirm that certain fixed points were never irrevocably rewritten.

The road ahead is a pocket of purgatory, lined with barren trees and untended pavements. The Glenn Miller Band floods the inside of the car, lush and carefree, unaware upon recording that their bandleader would never return from the war.

Clara’s hand steadies between her thighs, and each fingertip creeps over her underwear. She holds her breath and imagines his fingers. What might have been before Trap Street, in her classroom at the day’s end, fresh from the stars and stumbling into bed. The weight of his gaze. She’d guide him, yes, yes, his hands, sharp, musical, and eternally restless hands, a forefinger hooked in the binding of a book, twisting a wire, sweeping her up by the waist, gathering her corpse in his arms, blood soaked, broken boned, pointing a gun.

She pants, strikes the wheel in frustration, enough to hurt, and buries her face in her hands.

 

 

 

 

 

Her knees knock against cabinet doors while stealing booze from her parents’ dusty flat in South Shore. She nearly stubs a toe shooing away the cat. Its copper eyes follow her through the darkness, recognizing her as a rival.

Her parents are still asleep. Not yet married and heart achingly young. She doesn’t allow herself to dwell on her mother, admit that she’s real. Clara’s future is one where her mother doesn’t breathe, where her father’s quiet anger infested their home for years.

Stanley Park in late afternoon is all but unbearable with its lordly swans and blissed out families. At age seven, Clara had fallen on her face near the peddle boats. She’d knocked out two of her front teeth in the process. Photos from the day have her grinning broadly despite looking like a gap toothed tomato.

She never told that story to the Doctor for obvious reasons and now feels a twinge of regret for it. All those things they never got around to telling each other.

Her five Danny minutes happen before she gives up her bench to an elderly woman. She never returned to their park bench after he died. He was killed coming out of that park. Another thing the Doctor doesn’t know.

By minute four, she’s reliving their confrontation on the volcano, how she might have killed them both and torn up time just for the hope that the man she loved never die. They are so very similar in that sense.

“Shit,” she groans to herself, her eyes drooping closed and her hands falling on her knees, in disbelief over her own change of heart. She’s never been good at staying angry.

The woman taking her place frowns at the utter un-Englishness of a public breakdown.

Clara laughs in response. “Shit. Sorry—shit.” Cursing at the elderly. Her parents would be so proud. “It’s just that—” she pats the woman’s shoulder. “Old habits, you see.”

Clara races toward the car she awkwardly parked next to the swans. It comes as quite a shock to the woman when she climbs into the boot and then vanishes with the car into nothing, an unsuccessful parking ticket wafting in its wake.

 

 

 

 

 

Clara spots the Doctor on the beach ten minutes after he last saw her, a dejected and familiar silhouette looming on the horizon. He’s taken off his shoes and socks and has planted himself in the sand, an unspoken declaration of withdrawal from day-to-day living.

She stands next to him and crosses her arms. They won’t look at each other. “I’m furious with you,” she says.

“Well, I’m not even talking to you.”

Brilliant. Now that they’ve got that settled.

They watch the morning tides and exhale deeply with the self-consciousness of having stethoscopes to their backs.

He turns to stare at her, ice blue eyes, slack-jawed, and vaguely seasick, a Martian looking upon an earthling for the first time.

“What?” she demands.

“You’re stunning.” His body sways in place, toes fidgeting in the sand. Each gust of wind beats determinedly against wisps of his hair. “Like catatonic shock.”

Her face burns so hot she might submerge it into the wintry sea. She didn’t know she was capable. She wasn’t. Oh Christ, what vital organ did he jettison down the road just so she could blush again?

“You stupid bastard.”

He smiles a little, looks down. “You said we should say things to each other.”

Against her will, the last of her anger vanishes. What’s left is an impending sense of doom. The perks of being alive.

“Doing as you’re told,” she replies. “For once in your life.”

Might as well return the compliment.

“On your knees,” she commands. Naturally, he’s confused. “Just do it.”

With great suspicion, he drops into the sand one leg after another. She joins him, palms heavy on his shoulders. She begins tracing a finger along the side of his mouth. “This line,” she says. “I like this. I like what it does to your face on the terrifying occasion that you smile.”

“I’ll try very hard to keep it next regeneration.” He tugs at her sleeve, slips his thumb inside to find her bones, the pulse that refuses to return. He is trying to speak an unpractised language.

“Keep these too.” She presses both her thumbs to his mouth. His lips are swollen from what she’d done to him in the backseat. “They put up with my granny kisses.”

He takes in the new heat in her skin. She watches with fascination as he imparts a pinprick kiss to the flesh of her thumbs. This small victory. She licks her own lips and considers letting him suck on her fingers.

“I’ve grown quite fond of the eyebrows as well.” She smooths over the ridge of his brow and the muscle crinkles from the unexpected attention. “Might as well hang onto the colour in your eyes. Your Scottish tongue. No question about that nose. And the hair—”

“Should I make a list?”

“Maybe not the hair.” She breaks into a grin. “Needs a bit of a cull.”

The remorse washes over him. “Clara. I’m sorry.”

The mess they’ve gotten themselves into. No easy plan to win the day. Not anymore. Only endure or run away. The way it happens when time normally passes. Time as an act of labour.

“Yeah,” she replies. “Me too.”

 

 

 

 

 

Clara waits in line to check into the motel, practicing a terrible Texan accent that occasionally veers into West Midlands. The Doctor loiters on the pavement in front, palm outstretched in a thunderstorm. He’s collecting hailstones, raindrops ricocheting off the ground, litter and flags torn apart by the wind. It’s Kansas on July 4, 1976. The U.S. bicentennial. There wasn’t supposed to be any of this, weather phenomenon that could run pharaohs out of town. Bystanders from the parade scatter to find shelter, carrying beer cans, lawn chairs and small children with them.

Clara raps on the glass door, opening it slightly. “What do you want your name to be?”

He yells over the thunder, licking his cold rain lips. “Are we living in sin this time?”

“I certainly hope so.”

“Sergeant Pepper.”

“That’s mine.”

“So?”

“We can’t both be Sergeant Pepper.”

“It’s the dodgy bit of Dodge City. We can be anything we want.”

She doesn’t seem impressed by his clever wordplay. “They’ll think we’re some daft tribute band. The Sergeant Peppers.”

“What’s daft about being in a tribute band?”

Clara shakes her head. “You’ll catch a cold,” she says before reclaiming her place in line, no doubt having resolved to check them in as Sergeant and Mr. Pepper.

He remains where he is, the cold twining his bones, unable to look away from the swarm of coal black clouds snuffing out the stars.

 

 

 

 

 

The motel loses power.

Clara fumbles with a box of matches and curses each time one fails to light. The Doctor, soaking wet and shivering, sulks over the room’s defunct radiator. Even his own bespoke torture chamber had dry clothes waiting for him, albeit stiff, sooty, and reeking of algae. There had been an unconscious dread as he’d changed clothes, his beginning to suspect how they’d gotten there, the insufferable quiet of surviving.

Jittering shadows now unfurl onto the furniture with the candlelight. Clara cheers, some 21st century colloquialism that he suspects might be a little rude.

He feels her eyes on him. The air in the room imbued with the genial nerviness of a wedding night. She’d pulled him into the backseat earlier on impulse. They’d been basking in a shared high. Her family reunion had encouraged celebration and recklessness.

Time goes slower now, at once wispy and jagged, a point not yet fixed.

He turns to find the matches set on the table, thin locks of hair curling onto her cheeks, her lips parting with a clear aim. “I wanted you, this you, the first time I saw you in the TARDIS.”

He feels like some daft spiny creature moments before being splattered into roadkill.

“How did you manage to want that? Everything was going to hell. I was upset about my kidneys. A dinosaur was trying to eat us—”

“—the other first time.” She’s patient, tries to remain serious. “Glasgow.”

He considers this. “I’d told you I wasn’t your boyfriend.”

The Doctor had spent so much time trying not to notice her too closely, not wanting to pick up the details, the specks that made her who she was, what makes a person fall in love.

“You still aren’t,” she says.

He smiles. “I never thought I was.”

“Ha.”

A towel twists in her hands, what she was using to dry her hair before the power died. He’s only just noticed.

“Hey,” she calls, makes her way across the room to take his hands and bring him to the foot of the bed. She drapes the towel over his head and begins blotting it against his scalp, goading him to her height in the process. He fidgets and fixates on the emergency evacuation plan mounted on the door. Thunder crashes outside.

“I swear if I hear even a sneeze from you.”

“If I sneeze and you aren’t around to hear it, does it really count?”

She leaves the towel on his head for her own amusement. They go back to the clumsy silence, the anticipation of the inevitable.

“Do you promise not to kill yourself?”

If there were ever a competition for most awful subject changes, Clara Oswald would be reigning champion. Knowing that she’s joking doesn’t stop him from peeking under the towel with unshocked disapproval.

“That kind of thing could really turn a girl off from shagging,” she adds. “For life.”

“How many times can a person apologise?”

“Well, we’ll see, won’t we?” She rubs below his thumb good-naturedly. A gesture of truce, if only for a moment. After all, they’re sinners in hiding, putting off penance and redemption for another day.

“Is this your first time?” she asks. “As you.”

“Uh.” A soft laugh escapes his mouth. He doesn’t know how to say “yes” without seeming an object of pity. The towel slips to the floor in second-hand embarrassment.

“Mine too,” she says, trying to make him feel better, that patronising thing humans do.

“That’s not true.”

“Do you have photographic documentation or something?”

“I mean—” His shoulders slump. “I don’t know what I mean.” He’s suddenly become a boy trying to explain a broken window. “I left all my cards in the other coat.”

This is all terribly endearing to Clara, for some reason—and those cards, they once got mixed with a student’s, resulting in the Doctor explaining what a metaphor was to a giant man-eating caterpillar.

“I haven’t been with anyone since I was last alive,” she clarifies.

He looks a touch queasy. “That certainly puts a necrophiliac flavour to things.” She mirrors his expression, and he can’t help laugh. “Killed the mood again?”

At this rate, they’ll break a world record for the number of times any two individuals _almost_ had sex. They’ll be a cautionary tale.

She takes a good look at him, a careful but benign inspection, and slowly grins. “Disturbingly, no.”

To the surprise of all in attendance, he bows down to press a kiss onto her grinning mouth, thumb mapping her jaw.

“Do you want to—” Her fingers graze his ribs. “Are you okay to—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

She’s tearing off his jacket, the one she’s apparently decided she’ll never warm to, and tosses it out the open window. He got distracted from closing it earlier. This would be his comeuppance if he believed in that sort of thing.

“Jesus, Clara.”

“I’ll get you another one.”

He purses his lips into a small, wry smile. “You better.”

She seizes the collar of his shirt and kisses him back. Her forehead nuzzles against his chin, and two fingers trace the line of his waistcoat, its embroidery glittering in the dim light. She kisses his shoulder and makes her way back to his mouth. His cold fingers sprawl at the base of her neck when they meet, descending onto the bed, grappling and uncoordinated limbs, her unbuckling his belt as he sucks her bottom lip.

He pushes a fistful of dress along her thigh, his hand slipping under her knee and the other between her legs. An uneven cadence catches in her throat. He sees it, the look on her face, one of stifled panic, and instantly realises the reason.

The Doctor leans on his forearm, breathes heavily as they break away. “You’re wondering if you can still—”

Clara punches his shoulder without force, self-conscious and equally breathless. “Get out of my head.”

“Your face gave it away.”

“Well, can I?”

“No clue,” he says. “I’ve never been with anyone who’s been extracted.”

She ruminates on this for a moment, resignedly shrugs, and then pushes him onto his back. “Well, time to cross that off your bucket list.”

A sex bucket list. _How odious._

She hovers over him, and he fiddles with the clips on one of the braces of her dress, can’t quite see what he’s doing. The rain pelts harder into the window, bringing in leaves and other debris, and drenching the floor directly underneath. She sits up, one of her dress straps dangling over her breast, like some cartoon farmer, and moves to shut the window. “I’d told you to—”

“It’s not my fault. I got distracted.”

“By what?”

“You.”

“Right.” She turns around, her hands on her hips. “That level of sappy _shite_ is unforgivable. I simply won’t have it.”

“Fine,” he concedes, shifting himself onto his stomach, knees suspended off the other side of the bed. “I found the FM radio.”

The wood grain finish and sleek Lucite reminded him of one he once owned. There’s just something about the seventies.

She sits on the bed and lifts his chin. “Nerd.”

“Yeah,” he says, kissing the small of her back while she undoes her other strap. She rises to rustle the dress down, kicking it out of the way.

Back on the bed, she lifts the hem of her shirt, frustrated by the litany of clothes she’s wearing. “Patience. Patience is—”

His face presses insistently against her arse and finishes her sentence. “—cruel and unusual.”

She flings the shirt at a lamp, nearly hitting the candle, and closes her eyes. “Right, you are.”

They make dangerous houseguests.

He breathes against her skin, open-mouthed, feels her twitch, and devises a slight change of plan. “Hang on.”

Before she can reply, he’s gracelessly crawled onto the floor and settled himself between her legs. She watches him as he lifts her bare foot and puts his lips to her toes.

“Jesus.” She’s on the verge of a laugh, braces herself on the bed.

He pushes his thumbs deep into the sole of her foot and moves them in circles as he drags his lips to her heel and ankle, putting her foot onto his shoulder and continuing to kiss her calf, the long deep scrapes below her knee, unhealed since the sentient garden.

She rubs the tip of his ear between her fingers. “You don’t have some kind of foot fetish, do you?”

“No. Sorry to disappoint.” He moves higher and finds wisps of unshaved hair. Her skin smells cool and clean and fit to steep into his soul. “I know that’s your dream.”

“That is not my dream— _fuck.”_

He’s kissing her cunt through the damp fabric of her underwear. “Language.”

“Don’t fucking mother me. Especially when we’re—when you’re—” She’s fisting the covers, fighting not to fall back onto the bed, the heel of her foot digging onto his back.

“Duly noted.”

“You’ve totally done this.”

“I haven’t. Honest.” His forefinger hooks into the cotton and moves it aside. “Might’ve thought about it once. When I was bored.” He swipes his tongue against her clit and hears her hiss. “Meticulously.” He places his hand over her fingers tangling in his hair. “I want you to show me.”

Clara swallows hard, arching back, and takes both their hands to her cunt, bringing herself off as he follows, his lifting her closer to his mouth, her methodically sliding inside herself as she needs, where she needs, having him taste her fingers.

He eventually builds a rhythm, mouth on cunt, and she holds his head tightly, rocking against him, she’s almost there, on the cusp, she’s—

_God._

The sound she makes reels through his mind, an undiscovered mark of punctuation that alters his very understanding of human language. She collapses on the bed, sighing exaggeratedly, her hands flat on her bare stomach.

He places a cursory kiss on the inside of her thigh, getting it out of his system. “I think we’ve just unravelled another mystery of the universe.”

She begins laughing, hard enough that she might snort or hiccup or some other decidedly unerotic thing.

“Where’s our medal?” she blurts, body shaking in laughter. It’s the same rippling, demented laugh from when she almost flew out the TARDIS, practically mad scientist with all the thunder and lightning.

“Clara,” he murmurs into her skin, wiping his lips.

She sits up instantly, both her feet now square on the floor, and looks down like she’s genuinely considering cannibalising him. He wonders if that’s something humans did—or was it spiders? He’s always getting the two mixed up.

The Doctor grins. “Well?”

Clara won’t give him the pleasure—not that kind anyway. “You already know.”

She pushes him onto the floor with her foot on his chest, laying him sprawled on his back. She quickly takes off her knickers and tucks them into the pocket of his trousers as she descends on him.

“Are you afraid of losing them?” he asks.

“Yes, that’s exactly it,” she replies, her fingers on his trouser buttons and leaning down to kiss his mouth. “And you, _my Doctor_ , you’re not so easy to misplace.”

She pulls down his briefs far enough to find his cock and his hands latch onto her waist. He realises that she’s been studying him all this time, his alien observer, just as he has with her, her memory sharp enough never to write anything down, making deductions, his specks and flaws, somewhere having deemed him worthy of her.

She’s unyielding, straddles his legs, trapping him unto her, and inflicts long precise strokes, her eyes locked into his. He begins babbling her name. The hard _kuh_ churning in his mouth, fuelling his arousal. Nature rains hell outside and sirens toll. Her name will be the last word left in his mind, and she’ll soon be what’s left of existence, the sole survivor. She’ll know what to do in the hazy wreckage, yes, rummage and remake the universe in her own image.

She is beauty marks, tan lines, childhood scars, flesh swelling onto the cup of her bra. He can taste her sweat and the warm floral chemicals in her perfume. How much he wants her, the extent of which pangs on his conscience. A person shouldn’t be allowed to need someone this much. An intellectual impossibility. The toll it takes. What has this reduced him to?

Clara. His Clara.

He groans loudly, bearing his teeth as she roughly sinks into him. They pant over each other. Her belly, her cheeks, and shoulders, all a soft gilded pink as she rides him feverishly, stretching his arms over his head, turning his wrists purple, sparing him no gentleness.

They come together. The two of them unrelentingly alike, well-meaning delinquents, selfish and inclined to martyrdom—thwarted by misfortunes of their own making.

Her body drops next to him, eyes drawing closed.

“What a cliché,” she says, happily exhausted, not caring if it is. One of those things she can count on now, that and never having to clip her nails again.

He turns to her and gives her a thousand-yard stare. “Are we still friends?” 

She stifles a laugh, opens one eye, and squints with the other. “Aye, who are ye again, laddie? Not some ne'er–do–well I found off the side of the road?”

“Is that supposed to be Scottish?” He’s faintly amused, but mostly embarrassed for her. “That’s, that’s— _pirate_.”

She returns to her own accent. “I’ll have you know my pirate is incredibly different and just as magical.”

He kisses her hard as she laughs, the weight of his body pressing down onto hers. He slides down to her jaw, the line of her neck, her breastbone. Her breathing—even if a force of habit—staggers as his mouth lines against the trim of her bra. The wet scrape of his teeth against her nipple.

Clara strokes his hair when he pushes his ear to her chest. “Listening for my cold dead heart?”

He answers, “I’ll give you one of mine.”

“May I remind that you need both?”

“Another lie by the Shabogans.”

“What on Earth did you ever do to the Shabogans?”

“Nothing _on Earth_ as far as I know.” He hears another laugh and glances up at her. “What?”

She’s looking at him as she might a favourite old toy. “I don’t think there’s a word for you. I don’t think it’ll ever be invented.”

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a week before the power returns. He decides not to check ahead if a worse storm ever hits town—letting himself imagine the best.


	2. Part Two

He’s back in his barn and faces a forest of shrouded, swinging corpses, heads slumped and necks broken. The structure shudders as it struggles to sustain the burden. Bodies long dead and rotting. Flies circle their flesh. These are his victims.

Missy wears her High Council robes at his side. She gives him the same corrosive look as on the day they met, one of approval, of dangerous affection. The start of his first home.

“Oh, you’ve certainly caused a stir, old man.”

“I was always against the extraction chamber,” he argues, “warned against its misuse.”

He can see himself speaking, explaining himself. He doesn’t believe his own sincerity.

Nor does Missy. “Always knew you had it in you. Lord President.”

He knocks into the corpses at his back. Their stench surrounds him, primeval, empty, and virulent. The stench of the Time War.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’d snuff out the universe if it meant she could breathe one more hour. And I found her for you. Toasted myself at her funeral.”

He clenches his fists and pushes his way through the bodies. There are children among them.

She follows. “Oh, it was a quaint, stupid, little thing. They buried her next to her mother.”

He faces her. _“Stop.”_

“Four billion years for a ghost, and how many souls eviscerated?” She bows as the Gallifreyans had when they entrusted their planet to him, before he turned his back.

“The end of time is long and excruciating. Surely, you knew.” Missy decides on her last words. “We all die in the same agony as she did, what you craved in your grief and rage. Every life you’ve ever saved. Every civilization you’ve known. Everyone you love.”

 

 

 

 

 

The dream shrivels from memory. His eyes open, mouth contorted in a silent scream, hair soaked in sweat. Clara sleeps beside him. He gently pushes aside the hair at the back of her neck and uncovers three zeros carved into her skin. Morning habit.

Panic shoots through his spine when he hears a howl from outside. He bolts out of bed and opens the window. The manager of the motel has his hands clapped to his head. A flock of birds have shit all over his car.

The Doctor is tempted to soundly scold the man for causing undue distress. He also wants to kiss him from sheer relief. They’re staying on a small island in California that takes its name from Arthurian legend, the bright ports speckled with smoke white boats. The year is 2009—sturdily modern and not modern enough, a long way from where they started.

Slamming the window shut, he goes to hover over the sink and tries to control his hands from shaking. He scowls at his own reflection and defiantly begins brushing his teeth. It was never like this, letting bad moods get the best of him, festering the whole day until the universe magically solved his problems—which, of course, never happened.

“Must you always wake up like a bull in a china shop?” Clara remains in bed, reluctant to fully awake.

He flings the toothbrush into the sink and walks to his side of the bed. Toothpaste coats the corner of his mouth. “How about we start over? Found a town along the ocean. Name it Santa Clara.”

The other day, they’d been driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, their Ford becoming a convertible, a glamorous slice of exile. He wonders if there’s any particular reason they’ve been drifting between the desert and the sea.

She sits up and tucks the covers under her elbows. “There’s already a Santa Clara in California.”

“Nevada. Have we ever been to Nevada?”

He leans forward when she crooks her forefinger and lets her wipe away the toothpaste.

“Vegas. You nearly married Elvis.”

“So did you,” he adds.

She’s unsure on what to do with the glob of Colgate now on her finger. It must have seemed like a romantic idea at the time.

The other thing about bad moods—they’re always easier to forget when she's around. Not that he’d ever admit that out loud.

He offers his shirt, smelling of motor oil from when he was under the hood of the car at 3 am. He had the idea in his sleep-disordered zeal that he could make it talk like _Knight Rider_.

She realises that he never bothered to change—had the audacity to sleep in her bed in this state—and makes the same face reserved for stories about dogs and dead grandmothers. Clara expected more creative excuses from her students; after all, what were they for if not her own amusement?

“He left us at the altar in the end,” she says, wiping her finger on his clothes.

“How did we ever cope?” He feels like he’s still inhabiting a dream, the kind that kills you in your sleep.

A grin blooms on her face as she lays back. “Vodka.”

Sunlight pours into her hair and reveals like a divination small brittle strands at her temple going grey.

 

 

 

 

 

They approach Trap Street at a safe distance, 1500 years after its disassembling. History claims that it had to do with an unpreventable clash of civilizations. Something the Doctor will likely make his business. He won’t be able to help himself. Clara wonders whether she’ll be there with him.

Everything Ashildr had built is now collapsed and frayed. Broken furniture, child-sized jerseys, eyeglasses all languish alongside heaps of garbage on the street. How human the residents had become.

“What’s the fun in being a ghost if there’s no one to haunt?” She looks to him over her shoulder.

He’s not amused, flips his flashlight, and walks into what used to be a café.

She wanders in the direction of the mayor’s house, its walls left untended and discoloured. The door has been ripped off its hinges.

They’re looking for a method to overturn Clara’s death sentence; or at the very least, render her immune to the Quantum Shade when it happens. Something more risk-averse than what’s been previously tried. There are rumours about what’s been left behind, what even the scavengers avoided excavating.

They find it in the first room, where the Doctor had laid her to rest. The cage is set on a desk in plain sight.

“Doctor,” she calls.

He finds her on her knees like a curious child, staring intently at the birdcage, its inhabitant lying limply on its side, wings spasming.

“She’s hurt,” Clara says.

The Doctor watches it coldly. “It’ll take centuries more for her to die. All the lives she’s taken.”

He is crestfallen. They can’t draw the necessary material from a dying Shade. There are rusting implements scattered on the desk. Somebody had tried to concoct an antidote years ago, probably during a time of mass panic, the early days of mutiny. The procedure had mortally wounded the animal. They left it to die.

Clara stands up. “But we’re better than that, yeah? We won’t let her suffer.”

The Doctor stares at the bed. It’s been stripped bare since he’d left her there. Only a mattress.

She can predict his answer, that he can’t relieve everyone’s misery. His selective fatalism is one of her least favourite things about him.

“No.” He only angles his head toward the cage. “We won’t let her suffer.”

She removes the bird with care and thinks of everything she knows about ravens, their empathy and intelligence, how they’re never meant to be domesticated.

The Doctor holds two fingers to its head. “They teach you this trick in the Academy. How you earn your stripes. All you need is a good telepathic link, like administering anaesthetic.”

Clara feels the life leave the raven’s body.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s the wrong telephone box—or telephone booth, as they’re called here. The TARDIS has brought them to the Mojave Desert. The box is barely a box, no doors or windows, its slim dusty steel covered in bathroom graffiti, the kind of apparatus where a missing person makes their last call.

The Doctor is appalled. The TARDIS has been leading them astray, keeping them from finding her predecessor.

 _“Oh,”_ he growls. “I’m onto you. Don’t think I’m not on to you. _I am on to you.”_

“Doctor.”

He spins around. “She’s deliberately _misleading us.”_

“Yes, but it doesn’t exactly help antagonising an all-powerful sentient space-time vehicle, does it?”

She’s speaking from experience.

A shadow falls on her face, and her eyes widen. The Doctor turns to find that the TARDIS has transformed into an American diner, its coping mechanism for avoiding conflict.

He fixes himself to go Scottish in the middle of Nevada. “Is that supposed to impress me? Or did you really think I wouldn’t notice that—” he flings his arm in the direction of the building, “—my bleedin’ car just turned itself into an establishment for the procuring of minced cow and diabetes?”

Clara stands in awe of the guise and does nothing to hide this. She throws him a look, swings open the door, and leaves him with no choice but to follow her inside.

“She’s trying to distract us,” he warns.

“It’s working.”

The diner is long like a corridor. Chrome fixings and checkerboard floors. Red Cadillac seating and Americana mural in back that features their old flame. Buddy Holly on jukebox.

The air smells of gunpowder and the pomegranate tea the Doctor never finishes.

Every room in a TARDIS comes from a memory or a dream. She wonders where the Doctor found this place.

He’s begrudgingly impressed, examining the selection on the jukebox, his skin reflecting the colour of the flashing neon lights. “Diners are a fine harbour for a broken heart.”

She gives him a look. “What do you know about diners?”

“I worked in one.”

“Did it have first-rate fire insurance?”

“You laugh, Clara Oswald,” he says. “But it’s barkeeping with more condiments. The manuals are all the same.”

To prove his point, he steps behind the counter, tosses a dish rag over his shoulder, and puts on an accent like a 1940s American newsreel. “Welcome to Larry’s Grits and Cheese.” He claps his hands together. “What’ll you have, sweetheart?”

She rolls her eyes and sits on the stool across from him. Her feet barely reach the footrest. “Pancakes.”

He pats the counter definitively. “We don’t make pancakes.”

“How about grits?”

“Not that either.”

“Larry’s Grits and Cheese doesn’t make grits?”

“Our specials include irony, omelettes, and milkshakes.”

“Splendid. I’ll have that then. Extra helping of irony, please.”

“Right away.” He does a full turn and opens each drawer. There’s nothing but an array of pez dispensers. This TARDIS is even madder than the one before it.

He stalls. “Name’s Basil. If you’re wondering.”

“Basil.”

“What’s wrong with Basil?”

“Absolutely nothing. My best mate’s a Basil.”

“He sounds brilliant. Really sharp. Dazzling sense of style.” The Doctor points a spatula at her. “And who are you?”

“Cleopatra,” Clara answers with a flourish. “Queen of Egypt.”

“You sure about that?”

“No one asked you, Basil.” She takes his face and kisses him, succinct like a final say. She’s been meaning to do this for an hour now, but he wouldn’t stay still.

He indulges her until realising that he’s breaking character and pulls away, leaving her holding nothing, lips puckered and adrift.

“Sorry, darlin’. Larry’s Grits and Cheese has a very strict non-fraternisation policy.”

She nods in agreement, unwilling to give up the game. “Right. Apologies. Promise to behave.”

He turns his back to her and pretends at drying the counter.

She sits up straight and folds her hands safely in front of her. “I’m really from the stars. Ruling’s only a hobby.”

He turns around, brow quirked. “A spacewoman,” he says, letting the concept wash over him, the most exhilarating thing he never dare imagine. “Anybody waiting for you?”

“Poodle. Quintuplets.”

“Egypt has poodles then.”

“ _Space_ is full of poodles. Quintuplets are genetic. _If you’re wondering_.” She gives him a wink and then breaks into a toothy grin, delighted with herself, her seat swivelling in place.

The Doctor looks down at the counter. It’s his turn to be endeared.

“You?” she asks.

He answers honestly. “Just me.”

“Me too.”

“What about the children?”

“Left on the side of a road. Ate Marc Anthony when I lost interest.”

“And the poodle?”

“Met a nice Yorkie and settled down in Norfolk.”

“Good for them.”

She puts an elbow on the counter and makes a show of giving him a once-over. “I could use a dashing lad like you.”

“Oh, I’m dashing now?”

“Tea with Billie Holiday on a spinning star. Planets made of diamond and ash. Sword fights in 15th century Venice. Pantos by spider women. Sea monsters who whistle. All before lunch.”

“And what about my diner, queenie? A man has to make a living.”

“We’ll take it with us,” she says. ”We can do anything. You and I.”

He puts his thumb between his teeth while making up his mind, the sight of which she fixates on.

“Do you promise not to eat me?”

She lifts her chin, puts on her most credible look of queenly displeasure. “If I must.”

They keep their eyes on each other. There’s a part of her that wants to take him to a bowling alley like you do when you’re fifteen and in love. Steal a kiss behind the pick ‘n mix.

“What do you say?” She extends her hand but retracts when he tries to take it. “There’s only one condition, Basil. It’s very important we don’t forget. One trick to this kind of life.”

She does this trick quite a lot. Sometimes twice a day.

“Too late.” He leans over and kisses her. Beats her to it. She can feel his hearts pounding through his chest.

“I thought we were behaving,” she reminds.

He clears his throat, composing himself. “Yes. How are we doing on that?”

She smiles. “As well as expected.”

“Clara?” He reveals a displaced embarrassment, accounting for the misdeeds of a prodigal twin.

“Yes.”

“Two thousand years. I’ve never fried an egg.”

She goes in for one more kiss and bites his lip instead.

He sharply sucks in a breath, and she wonders if she’s really hurt him.

His gaze is turned to his feet. _“Clara.”_

_“Yes?”_

“When humans reproduce, do the offspring arrive half-grown and sitting in cupboards?”

Oh, Jesus. _Oh, Jesus._ “I’m fairly sure that’s not how it happens.”

He tilts his head, beckons her to the other side.

She steps around to find a child no older than five sitting comfortably under the counter, his mouth and hands smothered in melting chocolate, staring up at them as if they’re interrupting.

 

 

 

 

 

The Doctor looks like he’s having an argument with God, arms gesticulating wildly, a withering tirade directed at the heavens. They’re in the console room, the desktop smooth and white and unmade, just behind a backdoor in the diner.

Clara sits with their stowaway, a pile of napkins littering the floor from wiping his hands clean. The boy placidly watches the Doctor while sipping from a Capri Sun.

The TARDIS has been harbouring him for weeks. Her little project. Someone to love her back. Clara and the Doctor had been too preoccupied, too wrapped up in each other to notice.

“No, you can’t keep it,” the Doctor says.

The ship responds with a beep, insistent.

He frowns. “A human child is not a puppy.”

Three jangled beeps like banging on a piano.

“Don’t be ridiculous. We need to find its owner.”

Clara interjects, “The word you’re looking for is ‘parent.’”

She wonders if the Doctor knows that he’s a walking juxtaposition, shredding an electric guitar at Glastonbury one moment and shaking a fist at noncompliant tech the next. Sometimes, on very special occasions, all at once.

The Doctor gestures toward Clara and the child. “Do you know how much work they are?”

“Offence taken,” Clara says, offence not actually taken.

The lights on the console flicker.

“Yes,” the Doctor says. “I know you’ve clothed it and fed it and kept it alive for weeks. But we’re on a mission. There are more important things at hand. On top of the fact that I’m putting into effect a very non-negotiable rule against kidnapping _.”_

His brows rise in affront when he hears the TARDIS’s answer. “No, I do not do this all time. This emphatically falls in the category of stranger danger!”

The boy chooses this moment to yank on Clara’s sleeve and whisper in her ear. A bit shy, this one. Only communicates through whispers.

She addresses the room. _“Ahem.”_

All attention immediately bends to her.

“I’ll have you know that our guest lives on Woodborough Road. Near some very large trees and a fire station.” She leans over so that he can cup his mouth to her ear once more. “And his name is Freddie.”

 

 

 

 

 

Freddie goes home. The long way around.

They first stop off on one of Jupiter’s moons, blasting Roy Orbison on stereo while driving through icy roads carved into its hills. Everyone agreed that it’d be a pity if Freddie didn’t see a planet after all those weeks inside a TARDIS, particularly Jupiter in the spring.

Except they take a wrong turn after that and get burgled by Winston Churchill, followed by their burgling him in return, which leads to celebrating Guy Fawkes four times in a row and becoming responsible for it raining smoked herring in Finland.

In their defence, only five percent of that was done on purpose.

After a period of adjustment, Freddie finds the Doctor’s prickly demeanour as convincing as a hapless dad dressed as Santa. The Doctor, on the other hand, goes to great pains to insist that he is not the boy’s mam, minder, father, grandfather, nanny, butler, napkin, personal library, supply teacher, sidekick, vicar, chair, pillow, therapist, donkey, pet, or pal.

He claims all this despite learning all his tells for when he’s hungry, afraid, or homesick, providing him an endless supply of his favourite ice cream, warning him of the dangers of rote memorisation and the comedy stylings of artificial intelligence, and hoisting the boy onto his shoulders for a better view of an Empress of India.

In moments of quiet, the last before bedtime, the Doctor teaches Freddie how to draw, sitting side by side on the floor, crayons and paper strewn around them, the boy gifting each picture to Clara for safekeeping.

Clara is a refuge for Freddie’s whispered words. The first face he sees before committing an act of mischief. They conspire ways to play jokes on _Santa dad_. She counts his freckles, magics his oatmeal into funny faces, laughs at her own terrible jokes, hugs back, understands, makes promises that she’ll keep. He delights in her alternate lyrics to “Little Miss Muffet.” How she always sits him in front with her as she drives. Her bossy mandolin voice. Her smile too nice for unkindness.

"What do you think he'll remember about us?" he once hears Clara ask the Doctor after they've put him to bed.

 

 

 

 

 

When they reach Woodborough Road, Freddie wraps himself around the Doctor’s leg as he limps his way to the front door.

Clara rings the bell and looks fondly at the pair. “I once worried that if I ever had a daughter, I’d have to indulge her love for terrible boy bands.”

“What about the not terrible boy bands?”

“Is this when you tell me you used to be in a boy band?”

The door opens to reveal a face they knew. The same sunken eyes and downcast mouth. The stoicism of an old soldier.

Clara and the Doctor are speechless as Freddie leaps into the arms of his father, who is both relieved and bewildered. The man must be wondering how the child managed to wander off in the first place, having probably seen him moments ago; or why his son is suddenly tan and taller and missing a baby tooth.

“The General,” Clara quietly says, unnerved.

“No.” The Doctor feels heartsick. “The man who gave her his face.”

For a moment, he’d remembered what it was like to save someone’s day, that thrill and feeling of accomplishment, being a force of good.

For a moment, he thought everyone had lived.

 

 

 

 

 

They flee to a diner in New Mexico named Eddie’s. She curls up in a booth, bare toes on leather. Her corned beef and hash go cold as she absent-mindedly scribbles down an “F” and an “r” on a table napkin, amending the diner’s logo, renaming it after their cupboard son.

The Doctor joins her after finishing a phone call. “UNIT found some iffy time travel activity near Woolwich 1389. Never been myself. Might be good to have a look.”

Clara doesn’t acknowledge him, instead gripping the pen harder, with enough force that the napkin begins tearing.

She can tell that he’s studying her, calibrating that she’s upset. “This is when you tell me that I should’ve invented a tracking app for time machines.”

Clara sets the pen down. “It wasn’t just man flu.”

He looks away. “Don’t.”

“The General trusted you, and you ended her life. If someone had done that to you, I would have—”

“—killed them?”

The urge to weep sits in her throat. She hates that feeling, the uncontainable force of grief, how it gets in the way.

He doesn’t gloat, for what it’s worth. “I trusted them too. We brought them back. Look what happened.”

 _You are hated by everybody,_ she’d told the Time Lords. _But by nobody more than me._ She christened her fugitiveness with these words. She could avenge any hurt that befell him.

And yet.

“Doctor,” she says. “I don’t want to become the people we try to stop.”

 

 

 

 

 

He’s standing on an open field as Clara lands a 1920s biplane at his feet. The TARDIS is in another disguise and unabashedly showing off. So is her pilot. She’d signed up for lessons after Boxing Day, spurred on by the last dream on Christmas. She was two hours short of a proper licence. It was meant to be a surprise.

Now she’s helping him escape. The same old. Wrong planet, wrong time. He’d gotten himself entangled in some interwar intrigue. Spies, stolen blueprints, and grand parties. A trap. The jacket for his new tuxedo has already been lost. No doubt now riddled with bullet holes in the service of a brilliant but totally avoidable diversion. He likes showing off too.

Since fleeing Gallifrey, they’ve managed to accumulate a long list of individuals who want them dead. The Time Lords hire mercenaries to do their dirty work. It wouldn’t be a Wednesday without adding to the list.

She finds him looking comically stroppy in the leather bomber hat and goggles that she’s handed him. As soon as Clara takes off, his first task is unmaking his necktie, goading it to be swept off his fingertips.

“Where we going, guv?” she asks, dipping the plane low for a closer view of the waterfall, the canyon, and its jagged cliffs. The closest anyone will ever be to paradise, where the villains here make their home.

The Doctor stares at the pristine greenery, time-locked like his pilot, and yells coordinates over the engine. His answer leads to where there’s nothing left but desert, where nothing dare lives nor dies.

After landing, he leans against the plane, face marked in dirt and clothes near ruin.

“The first time I met you,” he says, “the other first time, you were Cockney.”

He raises a wineskin to his lips.

She fumbles out of her gloves and watches him drink. They’ve both grown tired of barely speaking since New Mexico. “Was I charming?”

“You kissed me.”

“Bold,” she says. “Did you blush?”

“Don’t be daft.”

“So, you did.” She’s never given much thought to her other selves finding him first. Vastra and Jenny mention the barmaid sometimes. She’d died young. A terrible accident.

“I can’t believe I never kissed you,” she says.

He lifts a corner of his mouth. She knows that his mind has gone to the night before, his head heavy on the pillow and tufts of her breath against the square of his chest. They fuck even if barely on speaking terms. They’d miss each other too much. Every nerve and muscle. He could close his eyes only as long as he felt her breathe.

“You’ve done more than that,” he replies.

“Before I died, I mean.” She takes his wineskin and drinks what’s left. “I’ve heard you kiss everyone.”

He stares while she wipes her mouth on the back of her hand. Sometimes she forgets how many years he had to live before becoming the man who met her first.

“Bad timing,” he suggests.

“And we call ourselves _time travellers_. Disgraceful.”

She considers their make-shift plane. It may be time for it to reconfigure into something else. An actual TARDIS even. Factory reset.

“We got it right in the end though.” He grins at her, as if conveying a private joke. It breaks her heart.

The blazing sun stains the sand a deep pink like molten roses. Her afterlife as a series of postcards of vast empty terrain. No time to write anything on the back. They’re always running out of time.

She keeps staring at the desert. “I hope so.”

 

 

 

 

 

It rains marigolds on the procession of mourners. They’ve arrived in another desert, another planet. He makes his way through a sea of burning candles and idols. The combined fragrances of incense and chocolate. Death as an occasion for celebration.

The funeral is what separates him from Clara.

The Doctor spots himself instead, his own face from the future, wearing a coat he’d given to a Dry Lands boy with dust-coated skin. The least he could do knowing what was coming.

They stand opposite each other as the procession moves around them, equally wary of the other man. He’s grown to hate these encounters, the whiff of decay in the spoilers.

“Where is she?” He instantly regrets the question, realising that he doesn’t want to know.

A trumpet sounds, shrill like an air raid siren, and the crowd cheers. The skins of the mourners change colours with each new prayer.

The older Doctor shakes his head. “Who?”

 _“Clara.”_ He reads his own expression, and his stomach knots, the fury building within him. Traitor.

The Doctor from the future has no interest in consoling or offering his sympathies. He watches his younger self with cold acceptance. “It’s been a very long time.”

The younger Doctor immediately leaves, pushing against the procession. This can’t be. Not after everything.

“Wait.” He turns around and sees the other man extend his hand, wanting to touch him. “You’re meant to keep this memory.”

“No, don’t,” he says, nearly a plea.

The older Doctor sees that he’s at the brink of unravelling. The power in a name. He veers off the script, fingers tapping intently against the ridge of his palm. His voice goes as soft as an apology. “Where is she?”

 

 

 

 

 

Clara stands on the steps of the little inn where they’re staying. She’s telling off a man thrice her age for rudeness, pointing a finger, informing him that she’s old enough to be his ancestor.

He has never felt more grateful to see such a hostile display.

She frowns when noticing that he’s coatless once again. “Where did you go?”

“I got lost.” He tries to smile. “Might’ve even missed you.”

She knows better than smiling back. “What have you done now?”

They climb up to their room after she accepts his non-committal answer. It is too hot for words. She’s in no mood to fuss over him.

He begins unfastening the buttons on a sleeve, the start of undressing for the shower. She bears her weight against a dresser and reads the same three lines in the TARDIS manual repeatedly. As it turns out, they’re both out of their depth when it comes to handling spacecraft at the height of adolescence. He smirks when he catches her staring, as though he were winning a game between them. Within seconds, the manual thuds to the floorboards and she’s sucking on his jaw.

He moves inside her, their grunting through messy, desperate thrusts, clothes sticking to their skin, as fine as paper. Her back is pressed against the door, feet lifted off the ground, and palms shifting tightly on his back. He kisses her until it aches, then hides his face in her neck, aspiring that they both liquefy, all their cares and scruples gone with them. She might glean something from the melodramatics, but he doesn’t care. Something’s always the matter. They carry on.

Clara repeats his name when she’s close, his real name, the one that doesn’t exist, her voice thick and stumbling. There are only so many people who’ve known this name with its fabled power to destroy. This is the first time he’s ever heard her say it, guarded so well by the smooth warmth of her mouth, her quick tongue.

Her feet return to the ground, and he drops to his knees, wraps his arms around her waist, and allows himself one harsh sob into the hollow of her ribs. He’d done the same on Trap Street, wept into her corpse moments before he was banished to his castle prison.

She runs her fingers through his curls. He doesn’t know that she’s holding back tears. “No more sleeping in motels.”

The words muffle as he echoes her. “No more.”

 

 

 

 

 

Herb Albert and The Tijuana Brass interrupt the tranquillity of a cow pasture in Scotland. The consequence of his controlling the stereo.

The TARDIS has landed under a spell of sunshine. Its wire-spoked wheels heavy on the damp Earth. They’ve moved to the backseat to watch the storm clouds disperse. The windows roll down to allow entry to the cool fragrant air of their surroundings.

Her head rests in his lap, and his fingers hesitate over the grey wisps at her temple. “When did you get these?”

Clara doesn’t answer for a moment, on the verge of dozing. “Some time after the zygons.”

“Oh.”

She curls into him, her cheek against his lap and an arm around his legs. “My dad started greying in his late twenties.” She grins widely at the thought of her father. There’s been no contact since the reunion. The risk is too great.

“He’s also lost a lot of his hair,” she says. “So I hope you like baldies.”

The Doctor settles a hand on the back of her scalp and imagines her succumbing to male-pattern baldness. _Well._ “Who says I like you now?”

“Might have heard a rumour.”

“You shouldn’t believe every rumour you hear. Especially the true ones.”

“Quite right,” she says, draping his arm over her middle. Her attention strays to the rear-view mirror. She sees the sky in it, pale blue and storm-grazed, assesses the sight as one might a crystal ball. “The universe hasn’t fractured.”

He pretends to scoff. “That old thing. It doesn’t seem to care much for us.”

“We care so it doesn’t have to.” She turns back to meet his eye. “Isn’t that right, Doctor?”

He holds her gaze. Every moment since Gallifrey has been a ticking bomb, not only in building to this conversation. He was in as much denial of this inevitability as he was of the idea of her going grey before the death sentence.

“If it hasn’t broken now, I don’t think it ever will,” he says. “I’d been waiting to see what happens. For signs. It was a risk—”

“We gambled every life we’ve ever saved. How could we do that?”

“It was either them or you.”

Clara rises and sits on her legs. She is bone-weary, devastated. “What have I made of you?”

He would look away if she wouldn’t think him cowardly. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does.”

He leans back, elbow jutting out the window, finally staring straight ahead. If only to say this. “Time, the universe, it’s all intact. The clocks are ticking. No pterodactyls in Hyde Park. No apocalypse on the horizon. None that we’ve caused anyway.”

He watches her take in this information. She’s looking for a reason to smile.

“The Time Lords figured it out,” she says. “That’s why they stopped. Life went on.”

“Somewhere down the road we find a way to stop your death before it becomes a fixed point. Or—”

“I return to Trap Street. Face the raven.”

“Yes.”

_There._

All that commotion, and she still dies in agony, spares the universe the same fate. It’s what he would have done.

She will no longer be a mayfly in the time she has left. Not like before. She’ll never grow old or succumb to disease or have descendants. Her human life, rife with penny-pinching, Monday mornings, and traffic jams. Belonging to a specific time and address. The steadfast home-warm love of the likes of Danny Pink. Gone.

They’ve become a pair of immortal miscreants, grasping at the reins of time. He had rules against that sort of thing. When he had rules.

Clara doesn’t seem terribly afraid or shocked. He realises that she’d already known, had the time to process, her indefatigable pragmatism, her misplaced faith in him.

“You let it happen.” She’s asking him to explain something he can’t imagine himself doing.

“I’ve done it before.” This is a lie. He’d died billions of deaths so he could reach out his hand and steal her away.

There’s been a last resort sitting in his pocket. Another thing he stole from Gallifrey. Flung out a window in Kansas with his coat. He had to go back and reclaim it in the middle of a thunderstorm.

 

 

 

 

 

They celebrate their birthdays on the same November day. Cocktails on the moon. Lunch followed by breakfast. Tea with Billie Holiday on a spinning star. By the end, they stumble into Coal Hill’s supply closet. The TARDIS has taken them to a Christmas Eve.

Clara drifts through the empty corridors and looks warmly at the handmade decorations, the national flags that she and Danny hung up one evening as an excuse to be near each other. In a few years, she’ll no longer recognise the names of students on the walls. All the people she loved will have moved on without her.

She and the Doctor sit on the floor of the supply closet with an impromptu birthday cake between them. The Doctor found a fruitcake in the teacher’s lounge and stuck a candle on it. Given that it has started moulding, the cake’s purpose is limited to the ceremonial.

He wears his caretaker’s coat for old time’s sake.

“Happy Birthday, my dear Basil.” She gifts him a brand new electric guitar, deep cherry red, a bow affixed to its body. The colour was the only thing she’d insisted on. The rest she’d left to the woman in the shop after a good flirt.

He is quietly thrilled by the instrument in his hands, as if she’s opened the door to a happy childhood memory. She can imagine a boy hiding with a record player, listening to Chuck Berry, dreaming of the world that made him.

He takes her hand, presses a kiss to her knuckles, and puts on a face of mock-sternness. The way he used to in the beginning.

“You owe me a coat, queenie.” He means _thank you._ Although a few days ago, he was walking around in a nylon green windbreaker. He’s been having to make do.

“Haven’t found the right one,” she says. “But you’ll have it. Promise.”

His gift to her lingers beside him. It’s wrapped in newspaper from 1986. “I never thought I’d say this to anyone, but you might outlive me. At least I hope so.”

“Don’t let this get to your head,” she tells him, “but you’re the last person I’d want to outlive.”

The Doctor swallows back a smile too sad for the occasion. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?” He tests the weight of his gift in his hands, somewhat reluctant to pass it on. “I—uh—I’ve spent a long time looking for the perfect book for you. You’re annoyingly well read. In the end, I thought of returning to an old favourite.”

“Is it my copy of Moby Dick? You’ve held onto that since your last face.”

“Not quite.”

She unwraps her gift to find a brand new _101 Places to See_. The first one is packed deep in her suitcase. His book offers 101 more places. It is leather bound with gold lettering. He’s drawn the illustrations himself. She is living out adventures on every page, immortalised once more. _Property of Clara Oswald_ is written on the preface in messy handwriting, a leaf stuck in the binding.

Her voice breaks. “Doctor.”

“Page one,” he says.

The electricity begins to flicker. The year is 2014. Somewhere out there, she’s agreed to run away with him. A second chance. Nothing could stop them.

He tells her there’s one more place to visit, last hours of the universe. They'll be there only a minute.

 

 

 

 

 

 _These have been the happiest years of my life_ , one says to the other.

The neural block lies warm on the floor next to him. There’s nothing he could deny her.

She grasps his hand tightly, as if this might preserve what they have left.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. This is right. I accept it.”  He wants to smile, wants to see her smile. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll remember.”

He feels her soul leave his body.

 

 

 

 

 

She cradles him, lips pressed against his salt-wet hair to smother her sobs, tears drying on her cheeks.

He won’t open his eyes.

Ashildr stands nearby, now as half as old as time. “What are you going to do?”

“Return to Gallifrey.” Clara sets his head down gently. The young TARDIS hums in protest.

She places her palm flat on the floor, hoping to soothe her ship. There’ll be no talking her out of it. Not this time. She’s only doing what needs to be done, following fate as protocol.

Ashildr nods and tries to hide her surprise. She must feel the need to convey a kind of respect for a person facing the end. Clara’s life is just as fleeting and unlived as it had been four billion years ago.

Unlived may not be the right word. Not anymore.

Clara moves her fingertips along the Doctor’s fringe. “I’m going back to Gallifrey. He needs his coat.” There’s grit in her voice. _Let me brave,_ she thinks. “I made a promise.”

She will make it up as she goes, a plan to win the day. Find his TARDIS. Defy the Time Lords. Live an eternity between one heartbeat and the last.

It’s funny.

The day you lose someone isn't the worst. At least you've got something to do.

It's all the days they stay gone.

 

 

 

 

  

He opens his eyes, hearts lighter and restless, a tick farther from hell.

There’s a woman in a blue dress who makes him laugh. She gives him something to eat, and he tells her a story.

“This Clara person,” she teases, “you must really like her.”

“Why do you say that?”

He remains in a daze, the specifics of her pretty face already scrambling in his mind. It pulls at his chest knowing that he’s forgetting something important.

 

 

 

 

 

She gives him a ship, a coat, a screwdriver, and a name, and she orders him to run.

He doesn’t look back.

 

 

 

 

 

A younger self points out a fugitive sitting on a bus centuries later. She rests her head against the window, utterly bored, perhaps crossed at her accomplice for getting lost. Death and funerals seem to hold little fascination for her.

This bus will take her back to the inn where they’re staying. The younger Doctor explains this, observing him like he doesn’t deserve what he’s being given, this chance to see her after letting her go.

He doesn’t care what he thinks. He barely remembers any of it, secretly lays the blame on the other man.

Without a second thought, he manoeuvres his body sideways through the mourners, an arm raised, unable to help himself, leaving behind his past.

Clara sees him under her window and immediately knows that he is not the man who brought her to this planet. She is glad to see him anyway, her eyes falling on the velvety coat, viewing it as a good tiding.

They hold their palms against the glass like a kiss. He stops himself from saying anything, shakes his head out of wanting. Truth is he doesn’t know what to say. His smile is slow and nervous, embarrassed that he can’t remember a last name. She is a wonder, living, glimmering déjà vu that his mind wrings to forget. How much did she have to mean to him that he couldn’t live on without forgetting?

When he looks down, she’s already fading. _Not this_ , he begs silently. _Remember this._

Grasping that something’s wrong, her smile falters, and she begins looking at him with pity and a dim longing. She’d greeted him as if they knew everything about each other. He longs for such familiarity. All that he’s come to know about the universe, but he’s forbidden this.

This was a choice they made. That much he knows. He holds his breath and keeps his eyes on Clara, still reaching for her, trying his best to retain her image, everything she makes him feel, even if his mind will snatch up the last of her in his sleep and file her away where he can’t find her.

The bus begins to move. His long fingers lift off the glass.

 

 

 

 

 

He keeps running until the time comes to face another confession dial, until it feels entirely possible that he’s grown tired of outliving.

The Doctor revisits an old face in his last life. Scottish tongue. Overactive eyebrows. A smile decorated in right angles.

He buries his last companion. The grave soil trickling from his fist. She was a country nurse living under Jim Crow who’d grown old alongside him; outlived each of her oppressors on this world and others. He’d thought she might live forever.

He sweeps the dirt out of his palms and shakes hands with each of her children at the service. It was a short battle at the end of a long life. In all of his own lives, he’d never grieved over something as quiet and common as cancer.

Now it’s his turn. His death is a secret. It’ll be nothing spectacular. The end of a cycle that was never meant to be. He can’t remember why he’d been given a second cycle in the first place. It was so long ago.

The Doctor decides to await his last moments on his ship, still dressed for a funeral.

But he’s unable to die on schedule, gets bored, and wanders off to unearth a long-abandoned artefact from a hidden bedroom that reappears before him. It’s the colour that catches his eye. A deep cherry red.

He plugs it into a radio in the console room and the chords crack beneath his pick. They grow into a song, sweet-sounding like the early days of summer, with no name or coda. He is beset with a suffocating ache.

The mind is byzantine, disobedient, bigger on the inside. A caretaker for the forsaken specks in life, including what makes one fall in love. His old mind spills at a piercing speed as he continues playing, unlocking the story behind a name too resilient to fade, three common words entombed deep within the heart of Gallifrey. The meaning of a promise and the sound of her laugh.

Two people in a diner once wondered whether forgotten memories became songs. They didn’t consider that the reverse could be true as well. That memories regenerate. That they might even heal.

The music stops, and his curved hand hovers near the waist of the guitar, his becoming newly aware of his surroundings. He takes in a lungful of breath and sets the instrument under the console.

And he does what he always does. He runs.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to thank veradune for her care and enthusiasm in reading this, on top of humoring the nonsense that I spew into her inbox on a daily basis. I’m tremendously grateful, and she is truly one of my favorite humans and deserves a Best Person Award for breathing.


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